28.03.2025
Sinclair Lewis: It Can't Happen Here

Published in 1935 this novel sat around in relative obscurity until late last year when it suddenly became one of the most ordered books on the internet. What prompted this sudden renaissance? Well, it's not hard to pin down - the rise and rise of Donald J. Trump.

Lewis's novel describes the rise of a tub-thumping populist politician, Berzelius (Buzz) Windrip, who, from nowhere, emerges as the Democratic nominee and then against all expectations, wins the Presidency. Doremus Jessop, the long term editor of The Informer, the town newspaper, and classically complacent liberal is forced to watch and endure the quite rapid slide of Windrip's administration from populist rabble-rousing to sinister Fascism.

There is no doubt that there are quite spooky parallels between the world of Lewis's novel and the real modern world - but it would be a major mistake to equate the book too closely to real life. It Can't Happen Here should not be judged as a prophesy because that's not what it was ever meant to be - it was written against the backdrop of emerging populist Fascism in Europe and what Lewis is trying to do here is to trace the way these ideologies develop and how the negligence of liberal or tolerant ‘ordinary' people allows monsters to emerge. What he's also keen to do is to illustrate just how seemingly civilised, decent people can transform into brutal oppressors when they are given permission to behave in that way.

Note: The audiobook can be listened to in full here. To download, right click and view the page source, then scroll to where the URLs for each of the fifteen mp3 files are located and right clicking to "Save Link As" for each of them, renaming the files numerically with the .mp3 extension.